One of the more skilled biographies baseball fans could hope to find.
Sports journalist Appel (Pinstripe Empire: The New York Yankees from Before the Babe to After the Boss, 2012, etc.) delves deeply into the baseball career and personal life of Casey Stengel (1890-1975), a solid player and legendary manager.
Citing new material unavailable to previous Stengel biographers and chroniclers of the New York Yankees, the author offers an informative, smoothly written account of a complex and relentlessly interesting subject. In 2009, the Major League Baseball Network sponsored a campaign to identify the most memorable “character” in the sport’s long history. Stengel placed first, ahead of Yogi Berra, Babe Ruth, Satchel Paige, and numerous other legends. Presumably, Stengel won because of his occasional antics on the field and in the dugout as well as for the way he spoke, an idiom dubbed in the 1930s as “Stengelese”—the New York Times described it as a “unique way of turning short answers into run-on sentences.” However, Appel demonstrates convincingly that Stengel was no clown. He could speak clearly and grammatically when he chose to do so, he was an insightful student and teacher of baseball, he understood how to connect with others, he was a sophisticated investor who accumulated wealth, and he was a loving husband to his wife for decades. Despite an unusual physique, he demonstrated outstanding athleticism as a youth and rose quickly through the ranks of professional baseball as a hitter and outfielder. After retiring from active playing, his baseball intelligence led him to managing in the minor and major leagues. Though his records with those early teams are unimpressive, when the New York Yankees hired Stengel to manage the 1949 season, the legend for winning began, lasting through 1960. After those remarkable baseball seasons, Stengel reluctantly retired, only to return in 1962 to lead the newly created New York Mets franchise. Stengel is unquestionably one of baseball’s most significant characters, and Appel is the perfect fit to chronicle his life.
One of the more skilled biographies baseball fans could hope to find.Pub Date: March 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-54047-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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